


Mr. Bright Side

by shyna_dovey_dovey



Category: Invader Zim
Genre: Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Everything Hurts, Gen, Implied Mpreg, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Medical Experimentation, Medical Torture, Not a Love Story, Post Mpreg, Psychological Torture, Sad, Smeets (Invader Zim), Suicidal Thoughts, The Almighty Tallest Being Assholes (Invader Zim)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:33:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24225148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shyna_dovey_dovey/pseuds/shyna_dovey_dovey
Summary: Dib Membrane always wanted to be a hero. He always knew that things like bigfeet and aliens existed. So when his planet was threatened with annihilation from the powerful Irken Armada, how could he have been expected not to sacrifice himself for the good of his planet?Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, saying goodbye to his home and living as the servant of the tyrannical rulers of an alien race.Maybe Dib would be treated better there than he'd ever been on Earth.Maybe he'd have grand space adventures that no human could ever dream of.Maybe he just needed to look on the bright side of things.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 19





	Mr. Bright Side

"Do you love him?" Asked Slaughter as she made her move.

"Hm?" Questioned Dib, his concentration broken from the sudden inquiry.

"Do you love him," repeated Slaughter, "my father, I mean."

"Oh." Said Dib with a small frown. He looked down at their chess board, choosing his words as careful as he chose his next move. "Love is a bit of a strong word, I think."

"But you love me," it wasn't a question.

"Unconditionally." Replied Dib easily. "You're my daughter; both you and your sister, and I will love as long as I live."

"But my father?" Her brows knit together, chewing her lower lip, an anxious habit she'd picked up from Dib. 

One more move and he would win.

But Dib missed his opportunity for victory, too distracted by Slaughter and her sudden line of questioning.

And then the game was over.

In chess, as in life, one wrong move could cost you dearly.

"....I am meant to serve him." Dib began again. "I have been in his service for too many years now. I am completely reliant on him for food and shelter; he is quite literally one of the most important parts of my life, and I can't imagine now what my life would be like without him." Dib cleared the board, returning the pieces to their homes and folding up the game; resetting everything to the way it should be. "But I do not love him." He said with a grimace. "I….I have tried." He looked down his glasses solemnly. "I tried my damnedest. If only for my own peace of mind; but in the end, I just couldn't do it."

It wouldn't have mattered how hard he tried. Even if he'd managed to slip into Stockholm Syndrome, Purple, and for that matter, Red, wouldn't have treated him any differently. They were both far too selfish for Dib to even pretend that they cared about his needs. After so many years of servitude to the Empire, Dib was left feeling socially outcast and completely touch starved.

Irkens were many things. They were cruel, they were strong, they were self-centered, they were intelligent, they were lazy, and they loved snacks.

But they were also xenophobic.

Irkens could care for one another. They could laugh, they could joke. They could hold hands. They could cuddle. They could even love, to a certain extent. 

Dib had seen it with his own eyes.

But Dib was also different from them. Even though he'd been here for more than twenty years, there wasn't a single Irken alive that trusted him. They kept Dib at an arm's length, not just because he was the property of the Tallests, but because he was foreign to them.

They didn't know him, but they also didn't take the time to try.

Dib had tried. He'd learned to speak Irken fluently only a year after he'd been sent to the Massive. The Mess Hall, he'd found, was the best time to catch an Irken off guard besides the end of their work shift. 

Dib would sit down at tables with empty seats and try to start up conversations, only for the Irkens around him to ignore him or leave the table to sit somewhere else. When he saw a group of Irkens playing a card game, he asked if he could join the next round and was hastily denied. Even walking the halls, he'd tried giving the elites respective greetings, but they did little more than regard him with a head nod or simply ignored him entirely.

Dib was alone.

The only people he really talked with were Red and Purple, but they forgot he even existed half the time. And when they remembered he was there, they became easily annoyed by his presence and sent him away, giving him a menial task or, sometimes, a special assignment that would take longer than six months to complete.

Could you even really say you'd been tortured by people who didn't even acknowledge your existence?

Well, the scars on Dib's chest and abdomen could certainly attest that he'd been tortured. And so did the extra sets of organs which now resided inside of his body.

He'd still never been certain of what exactly had compelled the Tallests to suddenly be interested in creating an Irken hybrid with the only non-Irken creature on the Massive, but what he did know, which he'd learned the hard way, was that you never denied the Tallests, and once they had an idea in their heads, it was impossible to change their minds.

It had been the worst experience of Dib's entire life.

With little to no explanation at all, an elite soldier had informed Dib that they were taking him to the Med Bay to get prepped for surgery.

Surgery? But what for?

Dib had fought, because of course he had.

He was Dib Membrane, and he wouldn't go down without a fight.

In the end, it took five elite soldiers to restrain him, and even then he'd been kicking and screaming all the way to the Med Bay. 

The Irkens knew enough to know that they needed to numb the area to avoid Dib struggling further due to his pain receptors being in agony. But what they didn't know, apparently, was that, generally, you were supposed to put the patient to sleep with anesthesia before you cut them open.

Forget the shock, Dib had had a complete meltdown. The metal straps restraining his arms and legs only made the situation worse. 

Not only was Dib the only human in space, but he was possibly also the only human to ever see what his own heart looked like while he was having an actual heart attack.

He wished he could have died just then. 

However, much like his other basic needs, death was a luxury that his Tallests refused to grant him.

Whatever they had injected him with must have been a monster of a tranquilizer, because when next Dib awoke, he had been informed that the surgery was a complete success. Dib was growing two fertilized eggs inside of him, and would have the honour to bear the smeets of the Tallests.

Having two heart attacks within the same year at age nineteen had to be some sort of record.

The pregnancy itself was a bit of a blur for Dib. He'd been constantly, harshly pulled back and forth emotionally between excited catatonia and being blissfully numb.

Dib remembered, some days he'd been so distraught that he had tried to find a way to slash his wrists with the flimsy, plastic fork he used to eat his meals because it was the only relatively sharp object that he had access to from where he was shackled to his bed. The attempt had been pathetic and he only grew more distraught from his obvious failure.

Then, some days, although they had been more rare, he would lay there quietly, mind blank and a nearly serene sense of calm washed over him as he gently, tenderly, stroked his own extended stomach, the irrational, but very human, instinct to nurture would take over for just a few moments, and Dib would find himself all but excited to see what his children would look like.

And then the fated day had arrived, and Dib was beyond ready to get this over with. It was the only time that he'd barked orders at the other Irkens and they'd actually listened to him. Not that Dib knew the entirety of the intricacies of pregnancy, but he knew that the Irkens only knew about the eggs that hatched from the smeetery, so Dib was pretty much the only expert in the room.

Gone was the pain. Gone was the misery. Gone were the drugs in the IV bag that kept Dib from his darker thoughts of suicide. Gone were there tubes and the sensors that monitored the health of his organs. And gone were the shackles that had held Dib prisoner to his bed for the entirety of his pregnancy.

A single cry rang into the stagnant air. The only sound that followed was another, lighter cry from a second source.

Through the mental exhaustion and the fatigue, he managed well enough to instruct the Irken on staff to cut the umbilical cords and get rid of the placenta.

The Irkens disappeared then and Dib hadn't thought much of it. He remembered that doctors back on Earth often ran additional tests on newborns to make sure there were no difficulties or obvious birth defects that needed to be addressed immediately. But what he saw when those Irkens returned with his smeets had made him absolutely livid. The smeets that were handed to him, his smeets, the ones that he'd carried inside of him for who knows how many cycles, were not swaddled, and crying in pain as they were now sporting standard issue Irken PAKs on their backs.

Dib lost his shit.

Even the Tallests couldn't intimidate him at that very moment. Nothing could prevent the deep, primal urge in his bones from taking over to protect his children.

He chewed them out. He yelled, he screamed, he berated the Tallests and was about ready to bite their heads off.

Of course, Red and Purple had been less than amused by the display. Really, they were far more annoyed than anything. They didn't take Dib or anything that he had to say seriously; they never had.

Because Dib wasn't a threat to them. He was a human. A different, inferior species. He was something akin to a pet. 

No, that wasn't right. Most people at least cared for their pets. Most people loved their pets and gave them praises and treats and didn't rearrange their organs to impregnate them just for the Hell of it.

Dib was barely even a servant.

He was a toy.

A toy that Red and Purple shared and left alone when he wasn't fun for them to play with anymore.

Even this, the pregnancy, the smeets, the raising of the smeets, all of it had been a giant bore for them and a waste of time.

So they abandoned their little project pretty quickly when they realized that the smeets wouldn't develop physically or mentally as quickly as a normal smeet would have. 

Maybe they had imagined it would have been entertaining to have death matches between their own tiny, hybrid smeets? Who knows.

But that was alright, because their lack of interest was Dib's gain, and he was able to raise his smeets how he wanted to raise them. 

He fed them and washed them and clothed them and took care of them; a single parent despite both of their fathers being on the same ship.

He watched them grow and taught them about Earth. He told them stories about his dad, their grandfather, and their aunt, his sister. He told them about Bloaty's Pizza and the fresh autumn breeze and the gasoline smell of the buses and the green grass that grew all over the planet. 

He told them about his favourite songs and his favourite movies and he taught them how to read and how to write. He taught them about science and fiction, about fantasy and astrology.

He was even allowed to name them.

Ripley, the eldest by two minutes, was Red's daughter. She was bratty and haughty and she very much embodied the 'me first' mentality of most Irkens. But she also made beautiful paintings and would scream when the slightest bit of grime touched her skin, unless, of course, it was oil from her paints.

Slaughter, the youngest, was Purple's daughter. She was very head strong and opinionated and she spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. But she had an angelic singing voice. And although she could easily talk circles around anyone in the room and very much enjoyed proving that she was right, she was much too shy to sing in front of others and grew embarrassed if anyone caught her so much as humming a tune.

"Slaughter!" Came the boisterous intrusion from the doorway. "Move your ass, we're gonna be late for the- oh. Hey, mom." Said Ripley as she entered the room.

"Hello, dear." Dib returned the greeting with a soft smile. To his credit, he had tried to get the girls to call him 'Dad' or 'Papa', or some other form of masculine parental identification. But once the girls had learned about traditional family units, they had been adamant about addressing Dib as their 'mother', since they already had two fathers. Dib found it bizarre, at first, but he'd quickly learned that his daughters were just as, if not more, stubborn than their fathers, so he just went along with it. After all, in the end, it didn't really matter what they called him, as long as they knew that he was their parent, then he could live with being a mom.

"Oh, right. The meeting." Slaughter stood gracefully from her chair, pushing it in and patting her tunic free of wrinkles. "Apologies, mother. We'll have to play again some other time. Fathers have called a meeting today with the main staff and crew of the Massive so…"

"It's fine." Dib gave her an easy smile. He was used to being excluded from pretty much every meeting. Even the more urgent ones that went over safety procedures and emergency protocols he was generally banned from attending.

"I'll inform you if anything significant is discussed today."

"Alright. But," he reached his own ashen hand out to gently clasp her emerald one. "You asked me before if I loved your father; what brought that on so suddenly?" 

"Maybe it has something to with that flight navigator you like so much? I know he'll definitely be at the meeting." Ripley teased her sister wickedly and Slaughter shot her a death glare in response.

"No particular reason. I was merely curious about the conditions of romantic love, nothing further. I-I have to go before we're late."

She let go of Dib's hand and Dib chuckled quietly to himself as, even though their voices became distant after they'd left, he could still hear the octave raise in Slaughter's voice, a telltale sign that she was bickering with her sister while flustered.

Dib placed his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand, concentrating on nothing in particular in front of him, an even sigh leaving his lips.

So Slaughter had a first crush, did she? Well, that certainly was exciting. Dib doubted that he'd be able to threaten the Irken of interest's life to any significant degree like a typical overprotective parent, or even provide his daughter with helpful dating advice since he'd been sent to the Massive when he was fourteen and remained a virgin even at fourty years old despite giving birth to twins.

Still, at least he was here to see it happen. He was alive, and he'd lived long enough to see his children grow into beautiful, healthy, mature adult women. 

Dib should look on the bright side of things, he supposed. Because the bright side was the only thing that kept him from fighting the urge to stop breathing.

**Author's Note:**

> Ripley is the name of the main character from the first Alien movie.
> 
> Slaughter is the last name of a famous paranormal investigator. (Yes that's real, look her up)


End file.
